Shantytown by Cesar Aira (Chris Andrews, translator)

Shantytown by Cesar Aira (Chris Andrews, translator)

I never know what to expect when I crack open a new César Aira book. It’s not always love at first sight. Varamo grew on me over time. The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira initially excited me, but now ranks as least favorite. A reader on Trevor’s (of The Mookse & the Gripes) forums made the comment that in Spanish Aira tends to be hit or miss. That’s not entirely a surprise. Consider the 60+ novellas the author has written and the diversity of topics/genres he covers. While there is that underlying thread of “Aira-ness” to everything I’ve read so far – no two are the same. Shantytown is no exception.

So what is Shantytown? If Quesadillas (the novella I wrote about last week) is all chaos and craziness, then Shantytown is an exercise in precision. It lacks the powerful, plot driving first person narrative voice of Villalobos’ book. Instead, Aira moves his characters through a carefully choreographed (though equally absurd) plot. Coincidences and clichés abound in what amounts to a modern fable – complete with a gentle giant, nefarious villain and pair of lovers separated by circumstances. Somehow Aira and his translator Chris Andrews make these old archetypes feel authentic and fresh.

The hero and protagonist, Maxi, is described in the opening pages by the omniscient narrator as a “meathead”. A good-hearted young man who spends his mornings working out in the gym and his evenings pulling carts for the city’s scavengers (politely referred to as “cardboard collectors”) who move ahead of the garbage trucks looking for items of value. Their route ends at the shantytown of the title – brightly lit by a web of electric bulbs strung over their makeshift homes.

The shantytown is known as the “Carousel” by the local police. The name is a reference to the town’s borders which form a circle. The streets lead into the circle’s center – like the spokes of a wheel. People go there to buy drugs; exactly where is difficult to track because the cars drive around and around the carousel. The shantytown, its inhabitants and Maxi (because of his evening labors) have been watched by one unsavory officer in particular, whose motives are questionable and methods unscrupulous. He is obviously up to know good. Somehow Maxi’s sister and her best friend become involved in the adventure, as does a young housekeeper and a homeless boy Maxi tries to befriend. The stories of all the characters converge at one point in time and space – much like the roads leading into the shantytown – and the story concludes, as we knew it would, with almost everyone living happily ever after. Though it contains few (if any) plot twists, Shantytown is overall a satisfying read.

That has everything to do with the prose. This novella contains some of the loveliest imagery since 2006’s Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. In both Aira somehow skirts the borders of magical realism without ever fully setting foot within them. Like when his characters are left stranded in a diner as the rain floods the city: “The four of them looked out of the windows: the storm had resumed in all its fury, as if it were starting over again, with a lavish festival of thunder and lightning, and the rain pounding like millions of drums. They had to rest their feet on the crossbars of the chairs because the tiled floor was under four inches of water. The waiters were sitting on the bar. There was nothing to do but wait.”

An even better example is the descriptions of the cardboard collectors’ carts , which Maxi pulls in the evenings:

Every new cart he pulled was different. But in spite of this variety, all of them were suited to the common purpose of transporting loads as quickly and easily as possible. Carts like that could not be bought, or found in the junk that people threw away. The collectors built them, probably from junk, but the bits and pieces that went into them came from all sorts of things, some of which were nothing like a cart. Maxi was hardly one to consider things from an aesthetic point of view, least of all these carts; but as it happened he was able to appreciate them more intimately than any observer because he was using them. More than that: he was yoked to them. HE had noticed how they were all different, in height, capacity, length, width, depth, wheel size … in others with wire mesh or canvas or even cardboard. The wheels were from a great variety of vehicles: bicycles, motorcycles, tri-cycles, baby carriages, even cars. Naturally, no two carts looked the same, and each had its own particular beauty, its value as folk art. This was not entirely new phenomenon. The historians of Buenos Aires had traced the evolution of the city’s carts and their decoration: the ingenious inscriptions and decorative painting (the renowned fileteado). BUt now it was different. This was the nineteen nineties and things had changed. These carts didn’t have inscriptions or painting or anything like that. They were purely functional, and since they were built from assembled odds and ends, their beauty was, in a sense, automatic or objective, and therefore very modern, too modern for any historian to bother with.

Vincent Van Gogh’s “Cafe Terrace At Night”

The more of these little books I read, the more apparent it becomes that Aira is constructing the geography which his characters inhabit with care. Miniature worlds bound by finite borders. Almost claustrophobic and with every detail carefully considered. Like the carts. Or the lighting. In this particular book most of the action takes place in the early morning or evenings. To convey this twi-lit world Aira seems to rely on a color palette reminiscent of Van Gogh’s painting Café Terrace At Night – shades of blue with pops of yellow. Yet Aira, himself, would contradict this.

If this is true – and I’m always skeptical of claims to divine inspiration that doesn’t require any work – then César Aira has benefited greatly from being translated. And Chris Andrews may have earned the title of collaborator. While his Spanish critics seem to feel, like the forum reader, that the quality of Aira’s work is unpredictable – the novellas which have been translated into English are (with only a few exceptions) remarkable.